Strategic Thinking in Jury Decisions: An Experimental Study

Abstract

Theoretical work by Feddersen and Pesendorfer (1998) has shown how strategic voting undermines the intuition that unanimous voting eliminates convictions of innocent defendants. We set up a level-k model of jury voting and experimentally investigate strategic thinking with an experimental design that uses intra-team communication. Looking at juries using the unanimity rule, we show that the jury performance depends on the strategic sophistication of jury members, which in turn depends on the complexity of the task at hand.

Keywords: Jury voting, levels of reasoning, Strategic voting